RM8 for Mac OS - Access Violation Error

Of course you are still experiencing issues. There hasn’t been an update in over 3 months now, although Bruce is apparently confident that there will be one soon, based on a recent Facebook post that he made.

Is there a reason to be on OS 12.0 instead of 12.4? It usually pays to keep as current as your hardware allows.

Virtualization on a mac is very resource intensive and exposes you to all the windows malware and anti-malware being on a mac completely avoids.

Post flagged despite positive viewer response so removed RM8 bug period suggestion.

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Thank you for the advice, Rooty. I’ll look into those options.

Why would you want to put a Windows emulator on a stable OS platform only to run an app which is still a long way from being a production version application in my view. I gave up on RM8 and found an credible alternative. Hopefully one day RM will have a truely Mac OS native application that is as stable as other native Mac OS applications.

M1 iMac, macOS 12.4, RM8.2.0.0, was 8.1.8.0
Updated and ran for a few hours:
A single Access Violation when editing “new” text then closing the Edit Person window.
Open/Run down from 13 seconds to 7 seconds.
Navigation using left/right or up/down navigation keys cannot keep up with key repeat - beeps on each character. OK with multiple single key presses…

I would really like to see a fix for the access violation plus improved responsiveness.

Dave

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very disappointing after 3 months of silence to still have mac AV crashes. My Open time remains at ~14 seconds on M1 Pro MBP 16GB ram. Activity monitor shows cpu use drops slowly from 100% to ~20 at idle. Memory use remains light at ~300MB. FTM runs at 0.2% cpu and ~400MB ram as usual.

New update and a blatant new mac bug: RM8 opens in a small 1/4 screen window and is too dumb to remember when you resize the window to fill the window (not full screen) with dock and menubar showing. If anyone had tried the new version on a mac this would have been the first thing seen. M1 Pro 16 ram all software current.

Roots TS told me to uninstall RM8 and reinstall due to possible issue with xml file. I did a complete removal and fresh install using 2 mac utilities. The average mac user would not know how to do this and the xml and other files would have remained as they are scattered all over. Of course this did not work but I did lose all my program settings.

Next TS wanted me to download and install a remote access program that requires full disk access. Apple TS does remote access well without full disk access but they know what they are doing. Sure I am going to give full disk access to people who do not know how macs work and introduce more mac bugs with every update – Not!

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RM window sizing works as expected on intel-based mac running Big Sur – starts with same size as prior to latest update. Then resized window larger to be near full screen, closed and restarted RM8, and window size is the same ‘near full screen’.

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Hi Rooty,
No problems with sizing of windows on this 8GB M1 iMac BUT…

When trying to test if window sizing was a problem I did have a one off access violation i.e. RM8 opened to the correct window size, I clicked to minimize, immediate access violation and RM8 shutdown (a quick flash of the error dialog then no RM8). Tried to repeat but OK on later attempts.
I had turned the iMac on from cold and RM8 was the first software run from the dock so within 1 minute of startup - I will try to repeat.

I too have a brand new M1. I’ve had Macs since the the first box. I’ve never seen an access violation in any Mac program. I have never once opened RM and not had Access violations- repeatedly. RM has been stringing me on for 4-5 years now with “It’s just around the corner”. As far as I’m concerned RM has failed in the Mac environment. I think you owe us all an apology, a refund (small as it may be) and you might as well quit pretending you can fix it. I am not interested in the technical stuff. All I want is a program that will guide me & document my work without interruptions. Is that too much to ask? It’s hard enough to learn the intricacies of genealogy without the impediment of a program that is inconsistent and frustrating. You have failed the casual user.

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I played with opening and closing RM8 mac with no file open and different files than my main one. After swapping around and manually dragging a window sude I got all the files to open in a full screen with dock and menubars showing.

The fix seemed to be similar to that to get the collapsed sidebar to show both FS and ancestry icons. Renee had told me to resize the window which is equivalent to slapping a 1950’s tv.

Being concerned with the potential damage from AV crashes I removed RM8 full disk access which tech support had told me was needed in RM7. RM8 was still able to do web searches to an external browser. Only Apple apps, my iDrive cloud backup service and Appcleaner uninstaller need full disk access. FTM is fine without it.

Website search results opening in an external browser is a real plus for RM8. It is much clumsier to get results in the internal browser in both RM8 and FTM. RM8 has some really good database cleanup features (merge duplicate sources/citations) that it is a shame it remains so unstable on mac.

I’m unable to import trees from Ancestry with more than a few hundred persons without getting AV (this is on iMac running macOS 12.5). First I get an error about ‘Login failed’ (though progress indicator is around half-way), and once that’s dismissed, I get AV. I am able to import these trees after exporting to GEDCOM and importing that, but have been getting AV’s sporadically all along.

FTM 2019 remains my workhorse because it syncs and updates seamlessly with Ancestry trees, but it’s useless for finding and correcting duplicates and errors. So at this point I’m just using RM for that task. As long as it remains unstable, that’s unlikely to change. FTM 2019 is not free of bugs, but it doesn’t crash.

It’s annoying that RM8 does not behave like a native macOS app. I cannot run full screen, none of the usual hotkeys work. At least RM7 behaved like the Windows app it was on Mac (it too had a tendency to crash), so it was not re-inventing long standing user interface conventions.

I hope they can fix the crashing at least.

It is disappointing that what promised to be an exciting update has not managed to live up to many Mac users expectations. For me coming from FTM 2019 a Windows based program that looks and feels like a Windows based program running on a Mac to RM7 then to RM8 another Windows based program that looks and performs like a Windows based program I decided enough was enough and have gone back to MacFamily Tree a truely Mac OS and IOS based application that, now they have provided flexibility in the source section of the application, is for me providing what I was hoping to get out of RM8. Does it sync with Ancestry? No! Does that matter to me? No! For me Ancestry is not my master database, it is just an online portal to gather information for ongoing assistance to my research. What really did it for me with the latest version of RM8 was when I was doing some GEDCOM import testing on a single person with limited media and sources and on the first import the application failed to import the GEDCOM file then crashed is a AV error and the second import of exactly the same file worked but still crashed with a AV error within a very short period of minor data entires. Then there is the make a cup of coffee wait for the app to open even before you open a file no matter what type of Mac you have. Still I live in hope that one day sometime in the distant future RM will have a capable Mac OS based application that looks, feels and performs like a Mac OS base application.

RM8 does not look and feel at all like a Windows program to me. I’d be just as annoyed if I were running it on Windows about how it does not have a menu bar, for example. Or how control-O does not bring up a File Open dialog.

It’s great that RM8 appears to now be a single code base and feature set and look and feel on both platforms, but there are these fit and finish items which I hope can be addressed, once the stability issues are sorted out.

FTM 2019 is pretty mac like to me after MacKiev rewrote it to work. RM8 appears to work better on Windows but is a terrible port to the mac and completely unmac like.

I tried macfamilytree 2021 and found it to be the smoothest mac program I have ever used but totally unacceptable for genealogy. The tree views are truly awful even after extensive tweaking and the person…edit window is a useless display of all data in narrow columns with endless scrolling to find anything.

MacKiev has been writing the Mac version since at least FTM 2014, so I would hope it was Mac like and functional long before 2019 because using FTM as an example, that means RM isn’t going to be Mac like and functional until about version 12.

Completely agree with what you say. My question to you and anyone else giving up on RM 8, I used RM 7 for a number of years. I’m concerned about getting my source information (via GEDcom) into a new program - and which one?

I, too, just want a stable genealogy program with good functionality for recording sources and notes - I’m a Mac only user. Not interested in sync-ing with online databases (Ancestry, etc). I never heard of MacFamily Tree. Just viewed a promotional video. It looks a bit heavy on the graphics gimmicky stuff, which, of course, the Mac does very well. Two questions: Any advice on getting source information out of RM7 or RM8 into a GEDcom or other export/import mechanism? Also - where are you and others at with Reunion?
John Chambers - your name looks familiar. Did you, by any chance, do a lot of work on Wooleys in Monmouth County, NJ?

I have moved my database via GEDCOM to a number of programs over the years and in my experience they all don’t do it well. They all have their faults particularly when it comes to sources. You would be forgiven for thinking that there is no GEDCOM standard. I found FTM 2019 probably the worst unless the GEDCOM was generated by Ancestry. MacFamily Tree has been around for along time. I used extensively but was always frustrated that there was only one source template so making the various types of sources fit the template was frustrating. As a result I switch over to FTM Ancestry Mac version and stayed with that through the change to Mackiev and now FTM 2019. Frustrated by what I, in my opinion see as, a pretty average user interface for Mac I started looking around and saw that RM was developing RM8 and it looked like it might fill what I was wanting particularly when it came to how it handled sources. So I purchased RM7 with the free upgrade to RM8. I was not really happy putting a Windows program which ran under a wrapper on my Mac but wanted to see if it was the solution I was looking for. Alas an OS upgrade saw the wrapper break and a considerable time pass before a fix was released then the RM8 release kept being put back. I joined the RM8 beta testing programme and saw the problems but thought that by the formal release some of the most concerning from my perspective would be resolved. Some were some weren’t, particularly the AV issue. I found the production version of RM8 to be not what I would expect from what is a native Mac OS app (RM words not mine when I queried RM support). MacFamily Tree released v10 recently and after trying the free fully functional trial version and seeing the total flexibility they added to source templates I moved back to it. As people work in different ways some like it and some don’t. For me two big pluses are source template flexibility and the ability to work seamlessly across Mac, iPhone and iPad. A number of people don’t like the person interface because they feel it too cluttered but I don’t mind it because I have customised it to suit my workflow. Some don’t like the tree view I am use to it and when I want a view more like what you see in FTM and RM I create a chart view and work from that as MFT allows you to double click on a chart box and it opens the person edit screen. When you have finished you just go back to the chart view and your updates are in the chart . It won’t suit everyone but no program does as I have seen from the various user groups I belong too. I am in Australia so not the person you are thinking off.

Thank you. My genealogy software path started with Reunion many years ago. I switched to RM in about 2014, having decided I needed much more robust citation functionality. I was very pleased to learn they were working on a “native” app. I didn’t install RM 8 until May 2022. I’m on an iMac - recently upgraded to Monterrey (macOS 12.5). I was hoping the OS upgrade might help - but no dice. I can run RM8 and look at stuff, but as soon as I want to add or edit anything - ACCESS VIOLATION. Very bummed.

We are always looking for the exact steps that reproduce errors. Make sure to send in error reports. Then open a support ticket with the exact steps to recreate it.